President Donald Trump announced more than $90 billion in investments from private companies that they said are tied to AI, tech, and energy during the “inaugural” Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on Tuesday.
Pennsylvania is a leading gas-producing state and an epicenter of the US fracking boom; some of the largest investments linked to the initiative were from energy companies, including “a $25 billion investment in data center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania” from Blackstone, and $15 billion in expansions announced by First Energy.
Trump repeated calls to “drill, baby, drill” during the event, and some gas companies were included on a fact sheet from Senator Dave McCormick listing the announcements. Enbridge plans to invest $1 billion to expand its gas pipelines “into Pennsylvania,” Equinor is investing $1.6 billion to “boost natural gas production at Equinor’s Pennsylvania facilities and explore opportunities to link gas to flexible power generation for data centers,” and Capital Power said it’s spending $3 billion over 10 years on an upgraded gas facility in the state.
Google’s president and chief investment officer, Ruth Porat, announced that the company plans to invest $25 billion to build data centers and AI infrastructure over the next two years across the PJM region, which includes 13 states and Washington, D.C., along with a 20-year, $3 billion US hydropower deal with Brookfield Energy.
Cloud computing company CoreWeave announced plans to invest $6 billion in a data center “to power the most cutting-edge AI use cases” in Pennsylvania. Anthropic will commit $1 million over three years to support a program that provides cybersecurity education and an additional $1 million over three years to “support energy research at Carnegie Mellon University.”
Meta announced a $2.5 million partnership to “support startups in rural Pennsylvania communities in addition to community accelerator training for small businesses,” while AWS CEO Matt Garman was also at the event, with Amazon pointing toward previously announced “plans to invest $20 billion in Pennsylvania to expand cloud computing infrastructure and advance AI innovation.”
Update, July 15th: Added details about several other companies, including Google and AWS.
